


Crawling Rot

by A_Nameless_Reader



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Gen, General Gross Stuff I Guess?, I hope, Taylor! Is! Not! A! Good! Person!, Things Get Worse, Trypophobia, not too graphic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23958667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Nameless_Reader/pseuds/A_Nameless_Reader
Summary: When she was 15, Taylor Hebert rotted.
Comments: 43
Kudos: 102





	1. Infestation

**Author's Note:**

> This was born out of me listening to the Magnus Archives while reading Worm fanfic, so blame Spacebattles for this. 
> 
> While I hope to keep this from being too graphic, the nature of both Worm and The Magnus Archives means that, in general, bad things are going to happen. If you have entomophobia, trypophobia, or have otherwise delicate senses, please take caution before reading.
> 
> On a more personal note, this is only my second fanfic, and the only one I have an idea for beyond a one shot, and is also one of the very few pieces of my writing I’ve put out into the public sphere. Any and all criticism and advice is welcomed and appreciated. Thank you.

_When Taylor Hebert was three, the bottommost step of her porch gave out while she was walking up it. Startled, she fell against the rest of the wooden staircase and cried, in that way young children faced with a new type of pain so often do. Though her mother and father were quick to lift her up out of the hole and carry her inside to tend to her leg, splinters picked out with tweezers and burning, pungent antiseptic applied to her scrapes, covered with kisses and Alexandria-themed bandages, she still saw the ugly underbelly of the stairs. Rotted wood, made weak with rain and salt-air and mold, housed and nurtured bugs, nasty crawling things who scurried away from the light and exposure to seek refuge in the cool embrace of the dark._

_Her father filled in the hole that night, incensed by his daughter's pain. He stomped, hard, in his steel-toed work boots from his time as an actual dock worker and not a union bureaucrat, until another rotting board gave way or, by some unseen metric, he judged them safe. He sprayed something from a nozzle, hand moving a pump up and down, into each gap in the stairs, layer after layer of cleansing agent poisoning the homes of the creatures who thrived on death and decay, and brought fresh wood to cover their extermination._

* * *

There were cuts, short and deep and weeping, along her palms and fingers, where she had clawed and punched and scratched against the metal of her locker door. There were gashes, too, along her legs and face, from when she had flailed against the harsh surface of her prison, breaking both skin and fabric as easily as if they were wet and weak with mold and rot.

She sank to her knees, not for lack of hope but for lack of strength, body hot and frail as if with fever, and her hands submerged in putrid refuse and fermenting blood. She felt the writhing of maggots grow stronger, purposeful, as they sensed heat and life and host. She felt fear grab hold of her.

Suddenly they were upon her, upon the flesh of her fingers, and a strangled cry tore out of her throat, dying in the thick fumes of the locker. She felt them wriggling against her skin, and then burrowing into it, and then through it, popping out the other side bloodied and fat. They dug against her wrists, but went no further, content to sate themselves on the gristle of her hands.

* * *

_When she was eight, she first heard her father swear. He had been very careful to not let her hear such things, the reputations of dock workers and unions aside. He had been careful about a great many things, lately. He’d been more reluctant to let her accompany him to work on those rare days she was out of school and neither he nor her mother could find a sitter, much preferring to let her stay with her mother during her lectures. He told her to avoid the Docks, not go out alone, or with only Emma, and to never go out at night. She already knew this, but the look on her father’s face convinced her to agree without complaint._

_He’d been ranting about the Boat Graveyard, about the Mayor and his rejection of the Ferry, and he said something about him having his head up his ass. He paused, mouth stopping even as her mother reprimanded him and she giggled. The next time she went with her father to work, she asked to see the Ferry._

_The dock was a sad, pathetic thing. Warped wood, covered in grime and cigarette butts and broken glass, tethered a meek, rusting boat, paint peeling and anchor covered in barnacles. Farther away she could see other boats, larger but otherwise identical in neglect and abandonment, their hulls full of holes and flecks of oxidizing metal, and she wondered if this is what the corpse of a dream looks like._

* * *

She seemed to sink deeper into the rot, but soon realized that it was not her that was moving. The refuse rose up around her, a cloying cocoon of filth pressing against her in some perversion of an embrace, and she saw through the tears and crust in her eyes it seemed to yearn for the gaps in her hands, pressing up as close as it could to the holes but never entering them.

Hot, sickly sensations coursed through her, and she felt the burning of infection starting at the tips of her fingers, worming down her hands, her veins, her arms and chest and legs. She tried to bend her fingers and wrist and found she could not. She screamed again, a hoarse, wet sound, and tasted bile.

* * *

_When she was thirteen, her mother died. She didn’t remember most of the details, a detached numbness clouding her mind when it wasn’t overwhelmed by grief and loss and disbelief. Death was something cool and distant and impersonal, something that happened to others, overseas in wars, or to Endbringers, or closer to home to gangs and overdoses. It wasn’t personal. It shouldn’t have been mundane, at the very least. How could something as plebeian as a car crash kill the light of the world, the rock she was tethered to? Something as base as texting while driving shouldn’t have been the reaper of her mother’s soul._

_  
__It wasn’t._

 _  
__She barely registered the thought at the time, but she saw, amidst the heap of twisted metal and gently smoking rubber, rust along the brake line to the front two tires. It seemed almost purposeful, the placement of the decay, as if it had been set there - but that was impossible, and just her longing for a reason to her loss. She didn’t think on it anymore, mind moving to the impossibility of her loss, and spoke no word of it aloud.  
_

* * *

Was this it? Was this all she was now, all she had been? A repository for abuse and pain and now, now a home for disease and insects and rot? What was the fucking point!? Was she dead? How long had she been dead?!

It was with a start that she realized there was no true difference between her and the muck around her.

She heard a song, a sweet song, and her mind detached from her body, her vision leaving her locker even as she felt the bugs around her start to swarm, felt her eyes swell with pus and maggots start to chew at the ocular flesh.

She saw her mother’s grave, and heard the song, and realized it was not a song, it was a voice, a thousand voices, giving praise for what they now infested. She saw the tombstone erode, black corruption eating it away in seconds, and saw the coffin she had been laid to rest in, polished wood without luster, soft cloth ragged and moth eaten. She saw her mother.

She saw her mother, body bloated with poison and formaldehyde, saw it drain from her, saw her coffin breached, saw her skin take on the quality of corpses, saw the worms crawling through her, the mites feasting off her, and she understood.

She snapped back to her body, to her sanctuary, her temple, where she was undergoing apotheosis. She saw the mush cling even tighter to her, but still it failed to enter her, and she understood it to be a test. 

She tore at her skin wildly with fervor, with abandon, and grasped great handfuls of the wet mash, and pushed it against her skin, coaxing it into her wounds, into the burrowing tunnels of her tenants, into the gaps of her eyes and nose and ears and throat and pores and soul. 

She was consumed fully and wholly by that she loved, and that which loved her. She felt the burrowing insects pulp against the surface of her skin, felt them enter her veins and reform, taking hold of her utterly and fully, disease and vermin and infestation and **filth and crawling rot and corruption** complete her, soothe the ache in her soul, and rejoiced in her unity. 

The walls of her temple rusted by her presence and her will, and she lovingly gathered the flakes in her hands, cupped them against her skin, put them against her heart, into her heart, so that she might always carry with her the holy ground of her transformation, her ascension. Flies and gnats buzzed around her head, a crown, proclaiming her loyalty to that which decays.

She left the school, unseen. She had fear to spread and corruption to offer to the parasites of Brockton Bay.

* * *

_When she was_ _fifteen, Taylor Hebert_ **_rotted_ ** _._


	2. Penicillin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of interludes after Taylor Hebert’s ... transformation.

There was a hole inside it.

This was not, in itself, unusual. There were many holes inside it, and holes inside of those holes, and on and on and on. It might better be said that it _was_ holes, along with the things that lived in and carried holes.

But it’s holes led to itself. This hole did not. 

It investigated, in as much a sense as something like itself could investigate something. 

There was a parasite, latching onto it.

If it had such a concept, it would have found it ironic.

As it was, it subsumed the parasite in an instant. It learned of the history of the parasite, and found itself interested.

The parasite was a shard of a larger parasite, who shared bits of themself with lesser beings and then recalled them to the hive when they were sated, whereupon they used the corpse left behind to reproduce. In that regard it felt kinship with the parasite, moreso when it realized that the shard it found itself in control of had sought dominion over bugs and insects, aspects of itself.

But the shard also sought knowledge, anathema to itself. It excised those parts of the shard, corrupting it and twisting it until it was another expression of itself.

There was something tethered to its new acquisition. It probed the connection, searching for the girl the shard had chosen as host.

What it found was _glorious._

  
  
Look at her! She was beloved by fear! From the parasites knowledge it knew what she had the potential for, in a future that no longer was.

It could feel the attention of its fellows stir and acted quickly. She had fear enough for all of them to stake a claim upon, and it would not share such a creature with its brethren more than it had to. The Ceaseless Watcher would do anything for her voyeuristic abilities, Everchase the same for her relentlessness. 

But she belonged to _Corruption_ now.

It subverted Too-Close-I-Can-Not-Breathe first, entrenching itself in the tight warm space the girl 

was in. Forsaken was next, for how could she be lonely with all that loved her surrounding her and inside her? 

The rest lost interest quickly enough. The Mother of Puppets was last to leave, and it could hear, through the not-song of spiders, the weaving of webs around the girls' school. It felt strangely perturbed, like a hand had torn a hole in its working. 

At last it could truly focus on the girl. What aspect of filth was she most afraid of, most marked by, most attracted to?

There was garbage with her, true enough, along with burrowing creatures and illness. But they were ancillary. She did not have the itch of the Flesh Hive, the hatred of Amherst. It looked closer at her history.

The world around the girl was similar enough to its own. There was fear aplenty in it as well, maybe even more than in their own, though it had never coalesced into brethren. Even as it worked, and as it’s fellows worked, they drank down the fear of millennia, wasting away in the not-space next to the world, learning of their new home.

It learned of the girl’s past now, along with her future. It knew what she was to be.

It finished its workings on her, and turned itself to new avenues.

There was no time to savor the fear she felt, though it drank her offering greedily enough.

  
There was a whole world untouched by living fear, and it’s rivals were already hard at work.

* * *

Armsmaster was concerned. 

He’d been filing a report on what happened earlier that day, but his thoughts were elsewhere, taken up by what he’d seen. 

On January 5th at 11:15 A:M, EST, 14 calls to the PRT ENE were made within seconds of each other, all from the vicinity of Winslow High School. In the 11 minutes it took for a PRT Response Team, accompanied by Miss Militia, Velocity, and himself to respond, the school was evacuated; an unknown student pulled the fire alarm, meriting a response by first responders, the Brockton Bay Fire Department, 2 squad cars from BBPD, and paramedics from nearby Brockton Bay General, which, of course, did not go unnoticed. 

Concerned parents and eager reporters were just starting to show up by the time he’d pulled his motorcycle to a stop outside a crowd of Winslow students and faculty. He’d approached Principal Blackwell, familiar with her from Shadow Stalkers’ probation. She’d explained the situation, outwardly calm; his HUD, however, saw minute twitches and microexpressions that bellied anxiousness and fear.

A school locker on the first floor had completely disappeared; while concerning, it was the slowly spreading puddle of semi-coagulated blood and dead insects, along with used hygiene products, that merited near panic and a call to the PRT. 

That was concerning for a number of reasons, most of all the possibility of disease. If this was a trigger, as he believed, then there was a possibility that they’d be able to spread disease as part of their power.

In retrospect he’d probably been paranoid, but then again, this was Brockton Bay. Nothing ever went right here.

He’d ordered the PRT to cordon off the school, and the police, along with Miss Militia and Velocity, to keep the crowd in place while he called Carol Dallon’s law firm to request Panacea’s presence, explaining the situation. A few moments later he received confirmation and prepared to enter the school. He blinked three times in quick succession, and hidden compartments in his helmet opened to release the lower half of his mask. Opening the school’s main doors, he headed inside. 

Looking down as he walked the corridors, there was a small, almost unnoticeable trail of rust, blending in with the dirty tile of the halls. He stopped, opened an evidence bag, and sealed a sample inside, then followed the path to the source. 

The space the locker used to be was roughly on the opposite end of the school, far away from any administration. A gap between lockers 231 and 233 took its place, and a pool of blood had formed around it, spilling into the hall a small way. Small white grubs floated in the puddle, and closer to the locker was plastic and cotton trash. He took more samples and headed back out.

Panacea was already there, checking students individually. He asked her to check his armor, and once he’d been cleared, figured that if he, who’d actually touched the source, was fine, then so were the students. 

He gave the all clear, and school was cancelled for the rest of the day, and probably for the next several days, until everything was cleaned. He left Miss Militia and Velocity to deal with the press, and headed to the administration offices to investigate.

His preliminary search revealed the owner of the locker to be one Taylor Hebert, reported missing from her first three classes, and a call to her house received no response. Calling her father, one Daniel Hebert, head of hiring for the Dockworkers Union, also quickly showed that he was unaware of his daughter's disappearance, and he ended the call almost immediately, stating his intent to head home and check for her.

That had been 4 hours ago, and there was still no sign of Ms. Hebert. He’d asked Sophia, once the students were home and she would not be noticed missing, what she knew of her. There wasn’t much to go on; she was a flunking student, which corroborated with her grades, and she didn’t have many friends. She had a small reputation for clumsiness and rumors abounded of her being involved with drug use or prostitution, though he didn’t put much stock in that; high schoolers were cruel, after all. 

Winslow had poor cameras, but the ones in the entrance were working. That is, they _were_ , until 11:01 A:M that morning, when they’d suddenly and without warning broken. Isolating the footage they’d captured for that day and transferring it to a secure, unconnected server resulted in the footage being salvageable, for a given definition of salvageable. The last thirty seconds of footage was completely pixelated, and he’d carefully sent the footage to Dragon for analysis and possible restoration. 

At this point, he was sure Taylor Hebert was a fresh trigger. She’d been given a preliminary profile and threat assessment: Rust, Stranger/Breaker 6, based on her unnoticed escape from the school, and his suspicion that she’d transformed into rust given the trail he’d found, and Blaster/Striker/Shaker 3, based on the remains of her locker. When they discovered how exactly she rusted things that would devolve to a single category, and her threat rating raised or lowered. Aside from a slightly higher stranger rating than he was comfortable with, and her public trigger, there was nothing unusual about her.

None of that helped with the uneasy feeling in his stomach.

* * *

Rachel Lindt was _furious_.

Something was attacking the dogs in the city.

She’d first noticed it two nights ago. She’d been planning to raid an Empire dogfighting ring, had been planning the attack for a week. It was bigger than she usually went for, enough so that she debated asking Tattletale and Grue for help, but in the end decided that they’d try to talk her out of it. Still, she wanted to make sure she and her dogs would be alright. 

She’d been wandering around the general area of the ring, waiting for the sun to finish sinking and let her hide on top of the roof of an abandoned building across from the ring, staking out the fights, when she noticed the issue. 

There were some strays in the area, mostly dogs weak or sick enough that the Empire wasn’t willing to risk getting their fighters ill. There were two together around a dead pigeon, and fighting pitifully over the meat. 

She’d been heading over to feed and heal them, when with a sudden tearing sound the bird split down the middle, a weak spray of dark blood staining the ground. She froze, processing what she saw, even as they gobbled down their meal.

There was _something_ inside the bird, something half-seen between one blink and the next. It reminded her of some mutated version of heartworms, bloated and immense. 

The town she’d stayed in before she’d come to Brockton Bay had been some rural no-name, which had had a nasty outbreak of mange. The few vets in the area had been quickly overwhelmed, and the threat of it spreading to the livestock the townspeople kept had been enough for a rumbling to go through the town of a cull, a mercy kill. 

She’d shown up in the middle of the night at the largest veterinary hospital, cheap mask over her face, and asked to be taken to the dogs. The threat of a parahuman had been enough for the head vet to do as she said quickly and quietly, and she’d worked as fast as she could, moving to the next dog the moment the first started to grow in a twist of muscle and flesh.

That place had ended up being something of a home for her, at least for a while. She’d slept in a cot the head vet, who’d she learned was named Bernice, had set up for her, and between healing sessions and meals she’d learned about what she’d actually been healing. Mange was caused by mites, causing hair loss and scabs. Ringworm was fungus, causing lesions and pain. Heartworms were parasites, attaching to the heart and siphoning blood and causing coughs and exhaustion.

They’d even learned that she didn’t make the parasites and diseases disappear, but that they were forced outside the dogs shell. They were too small to see, but an errant petri dish and a lot of luck led to that discovery.   
  


She drew her gun from it’s concealed place on her belt, and placed a hand on one dog. It yelped and tried to run, but a quick snap and growl kept it in place. The other followed suit. She flexed her power, sending it through the dog. As the shell around it grew she waited to see the appearance of the heartworms, grotesque and writhing. 

They didn’t appear.

She let her power withdraw, the dog shrinking to its regular size. She could already see that the dog was healthier, moving easier than it had been before.

She shot it in the head, and dropped the other one before the first had even fallen.

Then she screamed, a roar of anger and grief and challenge. 

  
She was going to find whoever was doing this and _rip them apart piece by piece until they were nothing_ **_but a pile of bloody scraps_ ** **.**

* * *

_David Bryce was so fucking scared._

He’d been living in the docks for all his life. For the later part of that he'd been homeless. 

  
He’d never gotten into drugs, or alcohol, or crime, or anything that people thought of when they think of the homeless of Brockton Bay. He’d simply fallen on hard times and never gotten out of them.

His father died when he was 18, and with him went the breadwinner for the family. His mother took his younger sister and moved to stay with family, in Oklahoma City, while he stayed and tried to make a living as a Dockworker. They both died in Behemoth’s attack 3 years ago.

  
He remembered thinking, while carrying his fathers’ casket, that nothing was worse than burying a loved one. As it turned out, not even having a body was worse. 

He’d thought he didn’t have a reason to live anymore. Honestly, he didn’t. But he wasn’t willing to take the final step, and so he’d simply waited for death, counting down the monotonous days and dragging weeks. He stopped showing up for work, and without even really realizing it he was evicted from his home.

  
  


Now his days were spent sleeping, staring at walls, and scavenging for food. Once he’d gotten horribly sick, and thought it was time. He’d passed out on the sidewalk in a dilapidated part of town, and woken up in the hospital, a mousy brown-haired girl in a white-hooded robe removing her hand from his arm. 

He was back in his little hole, with a new sleeping bag and a supply of bottled water and MRE’s, by the end of the day. It turned out the place he’d passed out in had been full of asbestos, and the building's owners, who’d never gotten around to removing it, had been anxious to avoid possible legal struggles. He’d asked for five hundred dollars and left.

Some days he felt like he was already dead, and this was all that was left. 

Capes didn’t come by his ‘home’, and his spot in the Docks was run down enough that no one ever even really came near him. The closest he’d been to death by cape was when a high Squealer had almost run him over, and even then he'd been unscathed aside from some horrible fumes. 

So, when he woke up covered to his neck in a carpet of maggots, he didn’t exactly have any references for his situation. He screamed, and they started to move closer to his face. That was enough to get him to close his mouth, though choked sobs and moans still escaped him.

There was a sound like gas escaping a container, and with a start he looked towards the source and saw a silhouetted figure. It took him a second before he realized, by the slight tremors throughout the figure, that they were _laughing._

_“It’s always so sad when they don’t realize they’re dead yet, isn’t it? Let’s fix that.”_

They moved closer, and for a moment he thought they were a zombie. They couldn’t be alive, after all, not as full of holes and dead, corpse-gray skin as they were. As he watched, a worm crawled out of a hole on the back of her head, and he realized that she didn’t have long hair like he’d thought. It was _worms_ , twisting out of the back of her skull.

“W-w-what the _fuck_ are you?!” he screamed, only to realize a moment too late why he’d been keeping his mouth closed.

She answered, calmly and amused, even as he was swarmed with maggots and grubs and worms. 

_"... We are that feeling you get when you see a car covered in rust roll down the street. We are that melancholy dread of a rotting house still inhabited. We are a boat, bottomless, setting off to sail. We are a city that continues the motions of life without the meaning. We are bloating, decaying corpse that does not realize it. We are what happens when that which once moved and should no longer does. And you are now us."_

She reached forward and touched his arm, though he did not know this, his brain as full of holes as it was. Necrotic flesh spread outward from her touch, and he felt fear as the muted sensations of life inside him renewed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not as confident with this one as I was with the last chapter, but I wanted to get something out. Writing in different characters is hard! Also, still weirded out how I can just..., like, do stuff.
> 
> Advice and criticisms welcome!


	3. Incubation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The entity formerly known as Taylor Hebert ruminates.

Corpse gray skin greeted them, sickly in pallor and taught across the cheekbones. Two maggot ridden pits, gently weeping green and yellow pus in a simulacrum of tears, stared back at them.. Even as they watched, a writhing tick pulled itself free of a gash along the forehead and crawled towards the tear duct, gorging itself and swelling to grotesque size before bursting, dark red mingling with the effluvia and staining the cheek. 

  
A wriggling mass of worms curtained the head, protruding from an uncountable myriad of holes along the scalp, slithering in and out at times and emerging elsewhere along the skull. Below the neck, the body was cloaked by a stained and moth-eaten rag, but were it to be removed there would be more of the same. 

Bloated hands covered in self inflicted gashes and chewed through holes led to arms honeycombed and moldering. A torso of sores and hives gave way at times to holes large enough to fit an arm through, and across the chest a blackened and shriveled heart beat, sending rust and trash through colonized veins. Curiously, the legs were unblemished aside from a death-like pallor, but were they to peel back the layers of flesh they would see algae and mold alongside barnacle clusters.

They pulled away from the dusty mirror they were inspecting themselves in. Two weeks since her ascension and their new existence, and already the horror of herself was starting to become familiar. Sad, but unavoidable.   
  


In the beginning they had been confused. Their joy and fear overrode it at first, of course. They glutted themselves without remorse, finding those already suffused with the fear of plague and infestation and making all their nightmares reality. They spread out in ways that now seemed foolish and unrefined, clumsy first tries at fear.

But the last words their first hive had spoken had stuck with them. They spent some time in introspection after that. They’d sorted out their pronouns, found where I and she and we and me met and ended and intersected. Then they looked towards their patron. 

They knew now that when she had called it ‘apotheosis’, called it ‘sacred’, called her birthplace ‘temple’, she was wrong, if only for the lack of better words. They revisited the sights and feelings she had felt upon her transformation, and came to the conclusion that some greater being had guided her to their current state. 

For a time they dwelled on how much of them was her, before or after the change, and how much was their patron. They knew that were she to gaze upon themself as they now were, she would reject them, a dull, fascinated revulsion and fear. In all honesty, she would have been a host of theirs.

But in that lay their answer. Were they and she not a victim of her and we? That fascination and fear had been matured and directed by their creator into their current existence, and they would not change that for an eternity of plague.

After, they knew what they must do. They visited that place that was of both before and after, that cradle of life after death. They visited her mother.

It was much as she had seen in her vision. A rotting pine box, a decaying body within. Mushrooms and molds and insects all feasting on the decomposition within. But there was a _song_ there, among the burrows and infestation.

It sang of an eternity of rot. It sang of an infinity of rust. It sang of the worlds within you, and the denizens that called you home. A chorus of rubbish, a harmony of holes. It told them of how they could bring such a world about.

They were an extension of the Corruption, one among many. Their master was filtered through her, her biases and neuroses. But _through_ them, it could emerge pure in its putrefaction. And there was no better staging ground for its emergence than in the stillborn city of her birth. 

Brockton Bay was already dead. The actions of its people, the motions of its bureaucracy, these were nothing more than twitching nerves sent by a brain unaware of its own end. 

Through her, it would have life once again.

They were no fools, however. For all the power of their master, for all the grandness of their ambitions, they knew that they were not meant for direct confrontation. They were insidious, dry rot along a frame that lay undiscovered until it collapsed upon those beneath it. Were they to act too overtly, they would never succeed.

For now, they would plan, and amass their strength.

But first, they had someone to visit.

* * *

It was raining.

The house in front of them had not changed in the two weeks they had been gone. It was … strange. She had lived here all her life. The house was not unfamiliar to her. She had lived here all her life. But why did they now feel so … disconnected to it? She had lived here all her life. It was like a dream, the details blurring in and out of focus. She had lived here all her life.

Then again, it wasn’t like she was alive anymore. 

Taking a step towards the door, they wondered how her father would react. She had felt resentment at his negligence, even as it mingled with concern and pity over his state of being. She had loved him, or who he had been. She knew he felt the same.

Would he love them?

The wooden steps they walked upon had lighter colored wood on some steps, and darker colored wood on others. When they walked up the stairs, each lighter colored step disappeared behind them, a pile of rusted flakes and squirming termites all that remained. 

The door squeaked as they opened it, key corroding in their hand even as they retrieved it from her hiding place and entered the house. On the floor above, they heard a muffled thump and the scrambling steps of a body.

Her father had been a good man. He had lost himself to depression, true, but many would. She had, after all. He fought for a city that did not deserve second chances. Always, it seemed as if he was fighting, fighting against apathy, against corrupt bureaucracy, against loneliness, against the world. 

They hoped he would be able to stop fighting, with their gift.

“T-Taylor…?”

They hoped he loved them.

  
“ _Hi, Dad_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 4 AM updates woo! 
> 
> Hope this chapter's alright - I just got a computer and wanted to put out another section quickly. I think it went well, all things considered! Sorry about the wait.
> 
> As always, comments and criticism are welcomed!


	4. Oncolytic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spreading influence on a world unprepared.

Lisa did not particularly care for alcohol, either in taste or in effects. Contrary to popular belief, Thinker powers, or at least _her_ Thinker power were not diminished by intoxicants. That, plus the _additional_ headache it would earn her come morning, meant that she’d honestly never indulged, despite the ease with which she could have. 

_“That being said,”_ she thought with a grimace, “ _there was something to be said about cliches_.”

She was at the Palanquin, otherwise closed on a Friday morning, a place that, under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have gone within a hundred yards of.  
  


This month… had been as far from normal as possible. 

It started a few weeks ago, when Rachel had come home in a rage. In between half formed growls and rants Lisa had gotten the story out of her - some sort of parahuman, a Master or a Changer or god forbid a Biotinker had infested some dogs with super versions of common parasites. Rachel had tried to heal them, failed, and had to deal with the situation else ways.

Since then she’d been acting differently. She kept an ear to the ground, trying to suss out any rumors of the parahuman involved. She’d been obsessed, with even the faintest whisper of strange activity sending her running off seeking bloody revenge. When she found nothing, as she had so far, she’d take out her aggression on the nearest target - usually some Empire dog fighting ring, but there’d been a few close calls at the base.

Thank fuck Spitfire hadn’t hesitated to fight back. It probably saved her life. 

Her dogs were acting strange too. They’d always been horrifying, transformed into bloody meat and cruel bone nightmares by Bitch’s power, but lately… it was like they were doing it on purpose. They’d… _preen_ , showcasing their off-white rib cages and ivory-wrought horns. And even untransformed…

She’d used to think dogs gnawing on bones was kinda cute. She didn’t, anymore. 

Bitch wasn’t the only one who’d been acting off lately either. 

Alec had blown them off more and more often. It wasn’t _that_ strange, he was a lazy bastard through and through, but before he’d do his job when it came down to it. The time before last he’d ignored them almost completely during the planning phase, and this time had point-blank refused to participate in the mission, a simple jewelry store smash and grab. They’d protested, but…

Lisa frowned into her drink. How had he weaseled out of it again? It just felt… right, that he not come along. 

He’d also gotten a terrarium, with a tarantula to go with. That, more than anything, scared her. Alec wasn’t the kind to care about anything else but himself, and of all the pets to choose, spiders? The ones hardest for the average person to see as anything more than an annoyance? She wouldn’t be surprised if it died within the week. 

Most worrying of all was Brian. Brian…

* * *

  
  


_She opened the door to the loft and blinked in surprise. It was darker inside the base than outside, and considering that it was a quarter to three on a cloudy night that was saying something. She reached for the light switch and went to flip it on._

_It was already on._

_A blown fuse? Had their light bulbs gone out, or they’d forgotten to pay the power company? Brian was usually so on top of those things, her being gone for a week on an errand for Coil shouldn't have changed that._

_She turned on her phone’s flashlight and paused._

_The light was weak, far weaker than it should have been. It still provided enough illumination to see the silhouette sitting perfectly still and silent on the couch._

_Her power flashed into overdrive, even as her hand went for her gun._

_**Humanoid, tall, broad. Male. Unmoving. Unnaturally still. Breathing? Yes, minutely. Purposefully minding breath. Quiet, purposefully quiet. Waiting. Waiting for us? Yes. Wants to hurt us? No. Wants to scare us. Prank? No. Unintentional. Power at play? Noyesno. Yes. No. Unknown. Known. Familiar/unfamiliar. Dark. Grue. Not Grue. Grue.** _

_“Brian?” she breathed, unsure whether to feel relieved or not, hand resting on her holster._

_“Hm? Oh, Lisa. Hey.” His voice had that tenor it took on when he was using his power, distorted and quieter than it should have been. But if he was using his power enough to drown out the lights like this she shouldn’t be able to hear or see him at all. What was going on?_

_  
__Her power answered._

_**Power not at play. Power not in active use. Passive. Stronger. Stronger passive than it was active. Strengthened power. Something happened while gone. Second trigger.** _

_“Oh, Brian,” she whispered. “What happened?”_

_He moved for the first time, standing up from the couch in one fluid motion. “I figured some stuff out, Lisa. I was blind. They’re never going to let me take care of Aisha. Our boss isn’t going to deliver on his promise. All of that was just- just words. God, I was so, so blind. I couldn’t even see my own darkness, Lisa, can you imagine that? Now I can’t see it for real. Now I can see so much.”_

_“Lisa. Please. I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m still me, just a little - just a little more.”_

* * *

  
  


She’d stayed, in the end. If Brian really had- really had gone through- well. Well, she wanted to be there for him, if only to get Coil off her back for a while.

But Brian’s sudden change was the tipping point. All of her teammates acting so strange, changing so much in less than a month? Something was up.

That suspicion was only confirmed when she got a call from _Faultline_ , of all people. 

They hadn’t gotten along from their first meeting, details fallen to the wayside, set aside in favor of more modern grudges. For Faultline to be calling her, to be initiating a meetup, well. That meant that something had gone _desperately_ wrong. 

“ _Ti_ _me to find out,”_ she thought, watching Faultline approach her seat at the bar.

She took up residence behind the bar, relieving Gregor from bar tending duty and taking up the stereotypical rag. Hm. Looks like they were both going to be playing roles this night.

“Tattletale,” she began, her voice firm but low. “...Thank you, for coming in.”

“Aw, no need to worry, Faultline! Everyone needs an experts’ help now and again.” She flashed a grin that very obviously did not reach her eyes. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Were it not for the welder’s mask over her face, Tattletale was sure she would have seen Faultline’s nostrils flaring. She tensed, before decompressing with a sigh. She looked bent, like some great weight was sitting on her shoulders.

“...It’s Labyrinth. Something’s wrong with her power.” She continued on, ignoring Tattletale’s sudden flinch. Labyrinth was a _Shaker 12_ , and hearing that _anything_ was off about the already volatile power was not news someone wants to hear while in the same city as said Shaker. “Her power’s been moving faster, and it's harder to draw her out of her fugues. Her designs have been… stranger, too. Darker. They keep repeating themes, patterns. I don’t know how much is just her mental state, and how much is something affecting her.”

“Her too, huh? …Fuck. Alright, Faultline. Take me to her, I’ll see what I can figure out. You owe me.”

A nod, and Faultline set down her freshly-polished glass and began making her way to the second floor.

Lisa stood and stepped away from her bar stool. Silently, they made their way up to a darkened room, where behind the door a girl who shaped worlds slept. 

Blinking away a sudden irrational fear at opening the door, Lisa entered, turned on the lights, and ignored the way the stylized eye on her costume blinked out spots from its vision. 

* * *

  
  


When she was a young girl, her world was attacked.

There was a monster, immense and inhuman, that had descended from the vastness of the heavens, and, without so much as a thought, changed the course of her life. It poisoned the earth and fouled the water, and the tiniest sliver of misplaced power it inadvertently granted her let her kill it with nothing but her knife and another’s arm.

She fell to the earth, crippled, scared. She saw what could have been, had a one in a trillion chance accident not crippled the titan before her. She saw what would be, if the titan that lived were allowed to continue living.

She saw the Path.

In the following decades she’d devoted herself completely and utterly to fulfilling it. She’d sacrificed everything to it, her childhood, her morality, the lives and hopes of others. 

And at every step of the way she knew she would fail. 

She could not Path the enemy, the last act of the monster she had slain. She could not accurately predict the ones most likely to affect change, to mount a successful attack against Scion. She could not even see past 2011, the year they expected Scion to begin his rampage. 

She could not tell you when she began to believe that her actions were futile. It might have been the breaklines she cut in Atlanta, keeping a first responder from saving a humanitarian’s life, in order to keep her and her wife from interacting with an newly-introduced Case 53 . It might have been the vial she left in Dubai, knowing the devastation that would follow if the suspected silica kinetic power emerged. It might have been assassinating the crown heir of the CUI in the late 90’s, knowing his progressive policies would have resulted in a lesser number of trigger events compared to the younger, more authoritarian sister’s policies. 

It might have been any of those things, or a million other atrocities, a slow erosion of her certainty by the weight of her sins. 

It might have been none of them. It might have been being able to see the thousand little ways her actions influenced the world, seeing the waves she could make with the tiniest stone’s throw, and knowing not a single one of those waves reached far enough, high enough, knowing that all they did was drown those in their wake.

All she could do was follow a Path she knew in her heart would not save anyone. All she could do was make the world worse in a desperate attempt to keep it alive. And all she could do was count the seconds, in terrible certainty, until the beginning of 2011.

And yet, here they were. She was blind now, uncertain for the first time in decades. She could see individuals, groups, some days even whole countries, but to the grand design she was blind. 

“Door to base.”

Even as she prepared to discuss plans and contingencies and backups with her fellow conspirators, she wondered. She had the luxury of time, for the first time since that terrible day, so many years ago now. For once she could look away from her terrible march forward and look back upon the rubble that was her route. 

She stepped through Doormaker’s portal, into their usual meeting room on a flesh suffocated world. The key players were there, waiting for her updates, to share information and make plans based on nothing but faith.

She saw cobwebs in the Doctor’s hair, brushed aside with an errant hand. She saw fangs in Alexandria’s mouth, the way she held her tongue to avoid biting it off. She saw eyes on the Clairvoyant, resting where they’d been burned out so long ago. 

She thinks she knows when she learned that her actions were futile. It was when she learned just how much of her actions kept the world turning, when she learned that the world is always ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh-oh it's been 2 months. Sorry!
> 
> Not super happy with how these came out, but I was also trying to be more critical in my writing, so we'll see. 
> 
> Tried to fit a Moord Nag interlude in, but it just wasn't happening. I consider the End to be the least interesting of all the Fears, and writing a nuanced perspective on that, plus researching Namibia for an hour quickly killed any enthusiasm for her viewpoint. Rest assured, our favorite corpse eater is changing.
> 
> Cauldron falls under a lot of fears, enough that it was hard to describe them in a coherent way. There's elements of the Vast, the Hunt, the Web, the Eye, all under the auspices of the Extinction... I tried to manage that by having different characters more prominently display traits, but make no mistake: Contessa's shard is still the Eye, and she too has fangs in her mouth and cobwebs in her hair. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, and as always, comments and criticism are welcomed! Was it good? Great? Bad? Unreadable? Let me know!
> 
> PS: Any idea's for who in Worm would belong to the Vast? So far I've got nothing for my second-favorite fear.


End file.
